Guitarist Richie Sambora is responsible for some of the most memorable riffs in rock music over the past 30 years as a member of the band Bon Jovi. Though he wasn’t the original lead guitarist of the group, all of their hit songs have come with Sambora at the guitar. Of course, rock ‘n’ rollers seem to attract a lot of female attention, and Sambora was no exception as he started a relationship with an A-lister.

That star would be Heather Locklear, who’d become one of the most well known people in all of television thanks to her roles in shows such as “Dynasty” and “T.J. Hooker” up to that point. Locklear had been married to Tommy Lee of Motley Crue during the late 1980s and early 1990s, splitting up in 1993. A year later, Sambora and Locklear would tie the knot in France. After nearly three years of being together, the couple welcomed their only child, Ava Elizabeth Sambora, on October 4, 1997.

Sambora would attend the Viewpoint School in Calabasas, California while growing up, which is a private school that’s highly rated and features a small student to teacher ratio. Once she graduated, Sambora decided to stay in the Los Angeles area, heading to Loyola Marymount University after receiving nearly a dozen scholarship offers according to her father. Like her high school, LMU is a private school that boasts a record as being ranked near the top 10 percent in American colleges. Needless to say, Sambora will have a nice backup plan if she earns her degree, even if she doesn’t want to go into modeling, acting or music.

It does seem, however, that Sambora wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps by getting into the acting world, as she’s signed with an agency that casts for acting roles. Sambora already has quite the social media following, boasting an Instagram account that has nearly 150,000 people following. She’s already gotten her foot in the door in terms of acting, too.

In 2012, Sambora would make her feature film debut when she was cast as Wendy, a small role in the Judd Apatow film “This Is 40”. She would then have a couple of brief television appearances with roles on the children’s show “Good Luck Charlie” and the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat”. Sambora then starred in the 2018 TV movie “Mommy Be Mine” as Summer Hughes”, and her next role is slated for “The Great Illusion”, a horror movie which also stars Selma Blair and Julie Gonzalo.

While she’s very much like her mother in the fact that she wants to be an actor (and also looks strikingly similar to Locklear), Sambora has made a lot of headlines lately by talking about her famous mom. Over the past decade, Locklear has unfortunately had multiple run-ins with the law, including twice in 2018 for assault and battery. Some of her other convictions have also involved drugs and alcohol, sending her down a scary path.

Sources that are close to Sambora have said that seeing her mother’s struggles have been “heartbreaking,” adding that “Ava is crushed by her mother’s behavior and feels she will only get help if she takes this incident seriously. If everyone protects Heather she will never change. Ava has had to watch her mother’s ups and downs and this is far worse than it has ever been...Something has to change, there has to be some sort of reality check there.”

The source would claim that Ava had been begging her mother to seek treatment for substance abuse, after years of seeing self-destruction. When Locklear finally agreed to enter rehabilitation, Sambora would go off to spend time with her father. “Ava had high hopes of a happy future for her mother, but things just have gotten worse,” one insider said.

Because of her struggles in the relationship with her mother, Sambora has been spotted more frequently with her father. In 2018, Ava accompanied Richie Sambora to Cleveland as he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In fact, Sambora would end up leaving Bon Jovi five years earlier, as he wanted to focus more on raising his daughter through her formative years.

In recent months, Richie Sambora has said that “I will of course always be there for Heather (Locklear) and especially Ava. I am very proud of my daughter for her composure and strength during this difficult time. Sambora himself is no stranger to substance abuse problems, but has been recovering since back in 2012 thanks to his daughter.

“(Ava) was like an angel to me, man,” he said. “That was the catalyst for me actually getting sober. Luckily I wasn’t that guy who lost his band, his family, his house and his job. I wasn’t a victim.” Hopefully Ava can have the same kind of influence on her mother, which might be difficult as she tries to juggle college and starting an acting career at the same time. Ava’s shown that she’s very mentally tough so far in her life, though, so you can’t doubt her on anything up to this point.

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